| Session Date | June 11, 2022 |
| Start Date | |
| End Date | |
| Starting Location | |
| Ending Location | |
| Player Characters | |
| Base XP Gained | Carry Over |
| Player Notes | ZZ's Notes |
The party headed out to explore some untrod corners to the west. They had not gotten far when they were ambushed by about 30 Hobgoblins from front, rear and flank. Lightning bolts from Hans and Burt to the front and rear slew many of them, and the rest of the party waded into the others and cut them down rapidly. Jarrik slew their apparent leader and Atticus, in giant badger form, slaughtered a number of others. The last two standing, both badly wounded from the lightning, surrendered to the party. They provided a little information, mainly that Gold had a vague sense of the party's presence and that their unit had been sent to patrol into the dungeon. They did not clearly know the path back as they did not expect to need to navigate it themselves. As with most of their kind, they were more interested in maintaining their honor than aught else. They offered to give their "parole" but the party decided instead to keep them close, and put them in the front rank to keep an eye on them.
Moving further west, the party came to a room. Burt opened a cabinet and found a huge eye just sitting there. It shot abeam at him, but he shrugged off its magic. Across the way, another door flew opened to reveal a second eye. This one's beam hit Mordecai, who ran off in terror. ZZ quickly rushed after him, managing to successfully cast remove fear to restore him. Meanwhile, the close eye was smothered in darkness (forget who cast it) while the second was quickly dispatched by badger-Atticus before it could do further damage.
After a quick return to loot the Hobgoblin bodies (to the disgust of the still live ones), the party headed south and took stairs down into a dank and musty temple of some sort. the floor was covered in slick mud, though ZZ ascertained it was only an inch or so of material over stone. The walls were smeared with mud and dark moss. Eight pillars carved to resemble worms reached to the ceiling. Six flanking statues depicted human-sized creatures, each like a human torso but with only horrible, vestigial limbs and a head more worm-like than human, though with something of both in them. Atop a wide dais to the south wasa block of roughly hewn black stone. A pit with a raised curb sat in the center. At the northern end was a 20’ high statue of a wormlike thing with terrible mandibles that gave off a feeling of dread. Worms writhed everywhere in the walls and floor.
The two Hobgoblins refused to go forward under any threat, so ZZ slipped ahead alone towards the northern statue. As he examined the room, a strange human male appeared from the shadows and began to converse with him. This was the Temple of the Great Worm, he said, who he sometimes called Old Leech. The "man" was quite sinister to say the least, and his skin seemed like clothes far too large for the person wearing them, and seemed to writhe at times (Z noted with his infravision that the man was far cooler than he should be). Old Leech was hungry, he told them, and demanded feeding. The party briefly discussed feeding it the two Hobgoblins, but the party decided this would violate their word to them from when they surrendered. The strange figure had lots of nice words for the party, such as "We who crawl in the dark love you” and “There are frightful things in the dark.” “We have always been. We shall always be. We are older than you can know.” “We are always close, just beneath the surface.” Suitably weirded out by the man, the party simply left. The man seemed unconcerned with that, merely saying that the Worm would find them sooner or later, no matter where they went.
After a minor fight with some wandering spiders, the party now ascended a long staircase to a higher level of the dungeon. The Hobgoblins told them they recalled coming this way, and that there were apparently numerous connections form this level to Castle Gold above. Near the stairs, the party found a huge carven face in a wall depicting a man they took to be Gold himself, flanked by statues of stern female elf warriors. The party considered where they would go next...